Forza Horizon 5 Drifting Guide: How to Drift & Tune Your Car

With Forza Horizon 5 taking the festival to Mexico, there’s plenty of winding roads down the sides of volcanoes and mountains and other twisting turns throughout the terrain that are perfect for drifting. This Forza Horizon 5 Drifting guide will get you a vehicle set to take on anything you throw at it, and give you some tips to maintain those drifts for even longer.

Drifting in Forza Horizon 5

There are a number of steps you’ll need to take in order to successfully drift in Forza Horizon 5, and we’ll talk you through them.

1. Pick the Correct Type of Car

The first thing you need to do is get a rear-wheel drive car for your drifting project. 4WD or Front-Wheel Drive cars will have too much grip around corners and will make it incredibly difficult to get that back end sliding out. Rear-Wheel Drive cars have all their power going to the rear wheels, causing it to slide out if you pump the gas when you’re steering around a bend.

We recommend checking out some relatively low-powered BMWs, a Nissan Silvia or a Mazda RX-7. The BMWs are a little trickier to get to grips with, but the Nissan Silvia and Mazda RX-7 are both inexpensive and are great beginner drifting cars in Forza Horizon 5.

2. Buying Upgrades for Your Car

Now that you’ve got your car, you need to tune it and buy a handful of upgrades to make sliding it around those bends even easier.

The most important here is to buy Drift Springs suspension and dampers. These will help keep your car nicely grounded around corners, rathe than have it bouncing all over the place.

You can also add Weight Reduction packages and Anti-Roll Bars should you want to give your car even higher power to weight ratio and a bit of extra rigidity.

The only other main element of your drift car you need to tune is the tires. You want to increase the track width on your tires as much as possible. This will give you some extra grip, which will allow you to control your drifts that little bit more easily when throwing it into corners and slapping your foot on the gas.

3. Tuning for Drifting in Forza Horizon 5

With our upgrades in-place, it’s time to dive into the tuning settings. First off, make sure that you’ve got a locked differential. This will ensure that one of your tires doesn’t suddenly get grip while the others are spinning, causing your drift to end prematurely. For this, put both the Acceleration and Deceleration to 100%.

Now you want to tweak your gear ratios. Specifically, you want to make them a little shorter than their default, but not so short that you’re constantly maxing out your gears or not have enough speed heading into corners. This may take some trial and error, so just keep tweaking things until you find the right balance for you.

Be sure to lower your ride height as much as possible. The lower you are to the ground, the lower your sense of gravity, giving you more stability in the corners.

Finally, we recommend putting your braking force on 100% front bias. This gives the front of your car plenty of control, while leaving the rear wheels loose, making them perfect for drifting.

4. Adjusting the Assist Settings

As convenient as an Automatic transmission is for normal racing, you’re going to want to change to Manual for drifting in Forza Horizon 5. This gives you plenty more control of when to apply power while actually drifting, allowing you to maintain it for longer.

While you’re at it, turn off traction control and stability control, as this will make the car naturally want to slide about.

5. Performing a Drift in Forza Horizon 5

Now that you’ve got your car all set up, it’s time to take it out on the open road. Find a nice windy section somewhere around the Horizon Mexico festival and go in at around 50-60 MPH to begin with.

Turn into the corner slightly and press RT to get some additional power. You should now begin to slide. Simply use the left analog stick to adjust the direction and keep feathering the throttle to maintain the slide.

When the corner comes to an end, stop accelerating and slowly straighten the car out with gentle adjustments of the left analog stick.

That’s everything you need to know on how to drift in Forza Horizon 5. For more tips and tricks, be sure to search for Twinfinite, or see more of our coverage on the game below.